Tethered to GPS devices and required to check in monthly with police, two convicted sex offenders so easily sidestepped efforts to monitor them that one was deemed safe enough to be formally released from state parole in the midst of what prosecutors now say was a months-long string of murders. Steven Dean Gordon, one of two transients accused of raping and murdering four women, was discharged from his state parole last November, a month after two of the women vanished from the streets of Santa Ana and just days before a third victim, a 28-year-old mother, was allegedly killed.

The 19th century laborers pooled their money to build the biscuit box of a church along Offutt Road in the southwest corner of Baltimore County. Atop a stone foundation they put four walls, eight windows, a peaked roof, three rows of pews, a pulpit for inspiration and a wood stove for warmth -- and called the thing done. It can hardly have been much to look at when it was completed in 1887, and it surely isn't now. But that could change if the Friends of the Cherry Hill African Union Methodist Protestant Church make good on their plans to turn it into a museum dedicated to local black history.

BEIJING - The Australian Maritime Safety Authority said Friday it had a new "credible lead" that suggested Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 probably crashed 680 miles northeast of the search area where more than a dozen planes and ships have been looking the last 10 days. The location was changed after a new analysis of radar data from the South China Sea and Malacca Strait before contact was lost with the Boeing 777, which was carrying 239 passengers and crew members when it disappeared March 8. "It indicated that the aircraft was traveling faster than previously estimated, resulting in increased fuel usage and reducing the possible distance the aircraft traveled south into the Indian Ocean," the Australian agency said Friday.

Regarding "Latest Cash Cow?" [Dec. 14]: From my own observation at Chantry Flats from 1991 till now, I can tell you that after the Forest Adventure Pass was introduced, on-site drinking and mischief vanished. The pass keeps out the portion of the public that likes to drink and destroy for free. Larry Gassan Los Angeles

To Libby Slate's "Emigres From 'City of Angels' Leave Behind a Lonely Pal" (July 12), I must add that the problem of continuing loss of close friendships in our mobile society is not confined to women. As a thirtysomething man, I have been fortunate to have enjoyed the companionship (non-sexual) of several close male friends. Unfortunately, all of them have now vanished from my life due to career changes, education or marriage that involved leaving the area. The loss is compounded by the difficulty of "replacing" the vanished friends.

The highway in question may or may not need a guardrail, but it is difficult to escape placing the ultimate responsibility squarely in the lap of the driver. The decision to not prosecute Mr. Shoemaker, despite absolute physical evidence of his crime, was a humane one. He has responded to this gesture of compassion by trying to sue the hell out of us. The sympathy I had for him vanished with that act. EDWARD M. RISSMAN Calabasas

David S. Phelps, 79, the archaeologist who unearthed a 16th century gold signet ring while exploring ties between native people and the doomed English colonists who first tried to settle the Outer Banks of North Carolina, died Feb. 21 at Fort Pierce, Fla. The Virginian-Pilot of Norfolk, Va., reported his death this week but did not give the cause. Phelps was professor emeritus of anthropology at East Carolina University in Greenville, N.C. The ring proved to have no apparent link to the 1587 English colony that vanished from Roanoke Island.

The annals of child kidnapping are replete with heartbreaking tragedies, but probably none have been quite as bizarre as the crime that first mesmerized, then convulsed, Los Angeles more than 70 years ago. By the time it was over, it would involve not only an apparent abduction, but also impersonation, police coercion, false imprisonment, psychiatric abuse and--this being Los Angeles--a court fight that stretched on for more than a decade.

Hours before he was killed, Nick Markowitz thought he was finally going home. It had been a strange, often scary two-day odyssey since a group of young men had snatched him off the street in his West Hills neighborhood and carted him up the coast to Santa Barbara, according to testimony before a Santa Barbara County grand jury released last week.

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia - - The hunt for debris from Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 intensified Saturday as Australian officials deployed additional aircraft and spotters to comb a wider expanse of waters in a remote and treacherous part of the south Indian Ocean. The Australian Maritime Safety Authority, which is leading a multinational search-and-rescue operation off the coast of western Australia, said it was dispatching six aircraft, including two commercial jets with 10 air observers, to cover an area of about 13,900 square miles.

Rush Limbaugh is right on this one. The reporting on Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which disappeared March 8, has turned into a spectacle - not the good kind. It's all "such a show," Limbaugh told his listeners Monday. "We've got anchors and anchorettes who don't know beans about even why an airplane flies. They couldn't explain the concept of air pressure differential or lift to you if their jobs depended on it. " Actually it's even worse than "such a show": The lack of any real information has pushed television news to new levels of unintentional self-parody.

A Santa Monica jury has awarded a female news producer $5.42 million after finding that a West Hollywood nightclub was negligent in the sexual assault on her in a club restroom. The 43-year-old woman sued the Here Lounge and club worker Victor Cruz, saying that she was assaulted and raped by him March 23, 2009. The Times is not identifying her because she is a victim of a sex crime. After a 15-day trial in Santa Monica Superior Court, jurors found that Cruz committed a sexual offense that harmed the woman and that Here Lounge's negligence was a substantial factor in causing that harm.

Kianna Jackson disappeared first. The 20-year-old called her mother on Oct. 2 and told her she was taking the bus to Santa Ana from her home in Las Vegas for a court date. The next day she stopped answering her phone. Twenty days later, Monique Vargas, a 34-year-old mother of three, left her sister's birthday party, telling family she was walking to the market to buy groceries. They haven't seen her since. Another 20 days later, Martha Anaya, 28, asked her boyfriend to pick up their young daughter because she had to work.

In Long Hill Township, N.J., authorities have used just about everything - divers, K-9 units, helicopters, all-terrain vehicles and scores of volunteers on horseback and on foot - to search for David Bird. The Wall Street Journal reporter, 55, who covers energy markets, hasn't been seen since Jan. 11, when he left home for a short walk. He was wearing a red jacket, bluejeans and sneakers, and left without his cellphone or his medication, which he is required to take twice a day. "This has really got everybody very concerned,: said the Rev. Victoria McGrath of All Saints Episcopal Church, where a prayer vigil for Bird earlier this week ended with the crowd singing, "He's got David Bird in his hands.

In recent years it's become a truism that the American military promises "no man left behind" when it goes to war. But in World War II, that promise was often not achievable and may not even have been a priority. More than 73,000 Americans remain missing in action and presumed dead from World War II. Of those, 47,000 disappeared in the Pacific during the "island hopping campaign" that can be said to have begun at Guadalcanal in 1942 and ended in Okinawa in 1945. Tracking down the remains of the MIAs and piecing together their final moments is the daunting, emotionally fraught quest - undertaken by civilians and the military - at the heart of "Vanished: The Sixty-Year Search for the Missing Men of World War II," a deeply reported, compellingly written book by Wil S. Hylton, a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine.

In the reshuffling of the cultural deck since the 1960s, the forgotten card appears to be the father. "The Vanishing Father," on PBS' "Frontline" tonight, only begins to explore the vast issue of what fatherhood in America really means, but it is at least interested in searching for that forgotten card.

Recent headlines bemoan the fact that, in the city of Los Angeles, only one woman - recently elected to a City Council with 14 men - holds elected office in City Hall. As for L.A. County, with 9.9 million residents, a lone woman sits on its five-member Board of Supervisors. California is not alone. Across the United States, only 73 women hold statewide elected offices - less than a quarter of available positions. That percentage has been declining for 12 years, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.

December 15, 2013 | By Christi Parsons, This post has been corrected. See the note below for details.

WASHINGTON -- Secretary of State John F. Kerry said Sunday that the U.S. is looking for “proof of life” regarding a former FBI agent who went missing in Iran nearly seven years ago during a visit that, according to several news organizations, was overseen by officials at the CIA. The Obama administration hasn't given up its efforts to secure the release of Robert Levinson, Kerry said on ABC's “This Week.” “To suggest that we've abandoned...